Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde Jonathan P

Introduction Leonora Carrington and the international avant-garde Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra Over the course of her extensive artistic and literary career, Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) took part in numerous interviews. While generally amenable to discussing her life and work, she patently refused to explain it. A late interview with the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist provides a striking, almost comic example of her resistance to answering questions about the origins and infl uences of her art. ‘Can you tell us more about the recurrence of horses?’ he asks. ‘I can,’ she replies, trotting out a formulaic and self-cancelling reply. ‘I used to ride a lot. My mother was Irish and it is well known that the Irish have a tradition with horses. This is a logical reply and I don ’ t think it ’ s really true. I don ’ t think it is that simple, but I don ’ t really know.’ 1 The interviewer ’ s attempt to locate a subjective origin for Carrington ’ s artistic themes and motifs swiftly arrives at a dead end. Her self- cancelling response is nonetheless revealing. In the negation of simple explanation, that is, we learn something of Carrington ’ s artistic process: not the ‘meaning’ of individual works or motifs, but the experimental form and force of her long career as an artist. Carrington ’ s career is marked by an experimentation rooted in diffi - culty, mystery, and the openness to uncertainty and non-knowledge, a commit- ment she articulates at the very moment she seems most obdurately to be fl outing the terms of the interview: ‘I don ’ t think it is that simple, but I don ’ t really know.’ Carrington ’ s resistance to interrogation is far from curmudgeonly. For her, the ‘diffi culty’ at the basis of her answers constitutes a fundamental aspect of the creative process; to reduce art to a set of hermeneutic codes or artistic infl uences was an absurdity – or, worse yet, an act of violence, a violation of the mystery of art. ‘Do not psychoanalyze my paintings,’ she orders another interviewer; ‘if you con- tinue I will go on strike.’ 2 As a polymath who experimented in a breathtaking variety of media – including sculpture, textile, cinema, theatre, poetry, painting, writing and cooking – Leonora Carrington is also one of the most powerful, if under-recognised, intellectual fi gures of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Spanning over three quarters ccintro.inddintro.indd 1 110/26/20160/26/2016 44:42:42:42:42 PPMM 2 jonathan p. eburne and catriona mcara of a century, her work draws from what both Anna Watz and Ara H. Merjian describe in their contributions to this volume as a ‘dizzying’ array of cultural reference points; and yet, more profoundly still, her work also offers tools for working through these systems of reference, in ways that are by turns wickedly funny and deeply moving. Delving into the misty recesses of ancient knowledge, Carrington ’ s work shares no less actively in the creative energy and polemical intensity of avant- garde movements throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-fi rst. Her body of art and writing is at once anachronistic and resiliently contemporary, offering a profound rejoinder to the crisis in knowledge-production we face in today ’ s world of information systems and diminishing faith in the sustainability of art. A champion of the participatory, experimental nature of artistic practice, she also commented on the ungovernability of artistic meaning. As she wrote in a 1976 artist ’ s statement: Writing and painting are alike in that both arts – music as well – come out of fi ngers and into some receptive artifact. The result, of course, is read, heard or seen through the receptive organs of those who receive the art and are supposed to ‘Be’ what all these different persons perceive differently. Therefore it seems that any introduction to art is fairly senseless since anybody can think or experience according to who he is. Very likely the introduction will not be read anyhow. Once a dog barked at a mask I made; that was the most honourable comment I ever received. 3 Recalling the ancient Cynics in both its accord with nature and its allusion to doglike ( kynikos) judgement, Carrington ’ s dismissal of the value of instruction characterises her strong autodidacticism and distance from established schools of writing and art. That said, she was intimately involved in the life of experimental artistic movements throughout her career – a paradox this volume explores in depth. Far from an isolated or reclusive artistic loner, Carrington worked collab- oratively in virtually every artistic medium, publishing illustrated books in France, designing stage sets and writing plays in Mexico, and contributing to collective artistic groups in New York, Mexico City, Paris and Chicago throughout her life. ‘Of all the artists I have ever met and known, Leonora has crossed more fron- tiers and passed over more mountain ranges than any other, and sailed across more deeps.’ 4 So writes the English poet Edward James, Carrington ’ s friend and patron, in 1976. James was referring not only to the vast geographical distances travelled by the artist-writer over the course of her long career, but to the alternative ter- rains of her experience as well: from her fi eld research into pre-Columbian myth to her encounters with madness; from experiments in new media to explorations in hermetic literature and occult wisdom. However peripatetic this intellectual odyssey may have been, Carrington ’ s work left a profound and lasting impression on the literary and artistic movements with which she came in contact. Her sin- gularity as a writer and artist of imaginative virtuosity is matched only by the breadth of her affi liations with the international avant-garde. ccintro.inddintro.indd 2 110/26/20160/26/2016 44:42:42:42:42 PPMM introduction 3 As the fi rst comprehensive examination of Carrington ’ s writing and art, this volume situates Carrington in an international as well as intellectual context. The chapters collected here examine the manifold intersections and resonances of Car- rington ’ s work in its relations to vanguard and experimental movements throughout the world, from surrealism to second-wave feminism. In addition to studying the histories and concepts of avant-garde movements throughout Europe and the Americas, Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde will provide a resource for readers interested in Carrington ’ s works beyond the merely introductory survey of her life and basic themes. Carrington ’ s audience has expanded radically in the years since her death, and continues to develop as her work becomes increasingly canonised as both ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ in the fi elds of literature and art. As we mark her centenary (2017), Carrington ’ s place as a major fi gure in the history of modern art, literature and thought comes increasingly into view, and this volume contributes to her continued, if posthumous, rise in global recognition. However beloved as an eccentric, Leonora Carrington fi gures centrally in modern art and literature. Though once marginalised in literary and art history as a ‘muse’ of the surrealist movement, her relations with working artists and her artistic productivity had long since galvanised her reputation as an artist and writer of great depth and consequence, albeit one who shunned the spectacle of artistic celebrity. Born in England in 1917, she participated in the surrealist movement in Paris during the 1930s, escaped from Nazi-occupied France through Spain and Portugal during the Second World War, and then lived in Mexico City from 1945 until her death in May 2011. With a career spanning over three-quarters of a century, she was at once an English writer, a French surrealist and a Latin American artist and author who was very much part of the ‘Boom generation’ of Magical Realists. Her work features strongly in feminist literary and art criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, and her novels and stories have been collected and published in English, French and Spanish, as well as in other languages around the world. Her work has recently been taken up anew by younger generations of artists and writers, some of whom – such as the novelist Chloe Aridjis and the visual artist Lucy Skaer – are represented in this collection. Leonora Carrington and the Interna- tional Avant-Garde is the fi rst major scholarly study of Carrington ’ s impact on modern art and literature as a whole, focusing on her interaction with international avant-garde movements such as surrealism and Mexican groups such as Poesía en Voz Alta. This book seeks to open up new directions in the study of Carrington ’ s work for future generations of scholars, artists and writers in the twenty-fi rst century. As with other radical artists, the life of Leonora Carrington has acquired a mythic quality. In 1938, twenty-one year-old Carrington, who had joined the surrealist group in Paris the previous year as a young English art student, took up residence in the village of Saint-Martin d’Ardèche with her lover, the surrealist painter Max Ernst. This relationship has often fi gured in histories of surrealism and ccintro.inddintro.indd 3 110/26/20160/26/2016 44:42:43:42:43 PPMM 4 jonathan p. eburne and catriona mcara modern art as either the origin or end-point of Carrington ’ s signifi cance to experimental art. Indeed, the story of her career is all too often bound up in the bio- graphical details of her relationship with the older painter, a relationship they each thematised in iconic paintings from this period. Though memorialised as idyllic respite from the rigours of 1930s anti-fascist politics, the mutual creativity of this period of ‘creative partnership’ also testifi es to the immanent catastrophe their fantasy life held temporary at bay.

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